UN: Nearly 5 million in Mali are hungry

New York - A convergence of droughts, harvest failures, locust
invasions and political conflicts in Mali have left 4.75 million people
without enough to eat, UN officials said on Friday.

Unicef Emergency Director Afshan Khan said the children's agency
estimates that almost a million children are suffering from varying
degrees of malnutrition - and close to half a million youngsters will
suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year.

"That's comparable to the crises we see in South Sudan and the Horn
of Africa," Khan said.

John Ging, the director of UN humanitarian operations, warned that
without an urgent infusion of additional funds "we can expect that
the situation will continue to deteriorate."
He said the United Nations has received just $230m of the $481m it
needs for humanitarian aid for Mali - just 48%.

In June Ging said that nearly 500 000 children under the age of five
were at risk of acute malnutrition and 1.5 million people were "food
insecure".

Khan said Unicef more than doubled the number of malnourished
children it was providing special nutrition for to 120 000 at the end
of 2013, "but that is a drop in the bucket compared to what is
needed".

Ging and Khan were part of a mission of emergency directors for UN
agencies and NGOs that visited Mali from 3-5 November.

"Mali has been going through a chronic nutrition crisis," Khan said.
"It's related to droughts, harvest failures, locust invasions and it's
further been aggravated by the political conflict, the insecurity, the
population displacement."

- AP

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Eight Palestinian children killed as missile slams into UN refugee camp playground

EXCHANGES of fire have killed eight Palestinian children in a Gaza refugee camp and four people in Israel, shattering hopes for an end to three weeks of devastating violence.

The missile that slammed into a public playground in the seafront Shati UN refugee camp on Monday also killed at least two other people and wounded another 46, many of them also children, emergency services said.

Tiny victims ... A relative points at Marwan Hassanein, 4, at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Marwan was injured by shrapnel while fleeing with his family on July 20 during Israeli shelling in the Shijaiyah neighbourhood. Picture: AP Source: AP

Soon after, a security source said five Gaza militants were killed in a shootout with troops in southern Israel.

Hamas’s armed wing claimed it killed 10 Israeli soldiers in a raid in the same area, and denied it lost any men.

The latest bloodshed pushed the Palestinian death toll from violence in and around the coastal enclave to more than 1050.

Palestinian medical sources blamed the refugee camp killings on the Israeli military, with witnesses saying the missiles had been fired from a fighter jet.

“An F-16 fired five rockets at a street in Shati camp where children were playing, killing some of them and injuring many more,” one said.

Inside Shifa hospital, an AFP correspondent saw the bodies of at least seven children from the blast at the camp, with more bodies being brought in on bloodied stretchers.

They were unloaded and taken directly to the mortuary.

The Israeli military categorically denied any attack, and said Hamas had aimed the rockets at Israel but that they misfired and hit the camp.

It also blamed an early attack inside the compound of Gaza’s biggest hospital on militant rocket fire that fell short of Israel and struck in the Palestinian territory.

In Israel, at least four people were killed when a mortar round fired from Gaza hit an administrative building in the Eshkol regional council, media reports said, in what was the biggest civilian loss of life inside the Jewish state since the start of the violence.

The latest deaths came after a brief lull in the fighting in Gaza for the beginning of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, torpedoing hopes of a truce despite intense international pressure.




Following increasingly urgent calls by the UN and the US for an “immediate ceasefire,” a senior source in the West Bank said Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas was heading to Cairo with Hamas representatives for fresh talks on ending the violence.

Earlier US President Barack Obama phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to demand an “immediate, unconditional humanitarian ceasefire”, in a call echoed hours later by the UN Security Council.

Mr Obama’s insistence has strained US-Israeli ties and put Netanyahu in a tight spot with hardliners in his government, commentators say.

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